CCSSO and National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center), working closely with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) authors, have released an official approach for publishing identifiers and XML designation to represent the CCSS, consistent with their adopted format and now available on www.corestandards.org.
The Delaware State Board of Education and the State Department of Education have collaborated on a set of guidelines that establishes a new performance framework for charter schools, known as the Charter Performance Framework. The framework is expected to provide clarity of charter school performance and a better platform for monitoring the schools. State Education Secretary Mark Murphy says, "What we achieve with this, is an ability to measure the performance of our charters each year and we have not had a good structure to do that work in the past."
Kansas Education Commissioner Diane DeBacker says that a task force will be created to address the achievement gap among students, noting, "we need to be looking at that at a state level." She plans to seek assistance from the Kansas African American Affairs Commission, Kansas Hispanic and Latino Affairs Commission, and the Midwest Equity Assistance Center at Kansas State University to address achievement gaps among certain student groups.
According to The Nation's Report Card from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), about 25 percent of the 50,000 students who participated in the United States' first national computer-based writing test scored a "proficient" or "advanced" score on the test. While NAEP has conducted writing assessments in the past, this is the first year the test was computer-based, according to officials from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).
Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers has proposed a $7 million budget initiative that calls for all public high school juniors to take the ACT college admissions test and replace the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) with other ACT tests to measure college and career readiness.
Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White met with the Nonpublic School Commission on Sept. 11 to discuss a "conceptual framework" for new rules for nonpublic schools seeking funding and to offer vouchers. White said a number of review and approval processes are under revision with the goal of "minimizing work not dedicated to student achievement."
On Sept. 11, Maine Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen rolled out Literacy for ME, an initiative that aims to raise literacy levels statewide. He said that rather than depend only on public schools, communities must create plans to boost literacy rates from birth to adulthood, and he called on early-childhood education providers, public schools, adult education programs, higher education institutions, charitable foundations, and other organizations to collaborate to identify and close gaps.
At a recent teacher and staff breakfast, New Hampshire Education Commissioner Dr. Virginia Barry praised SAU 13 -- which includes schools in Freedom, Madison, and Tamworth -- for its efforts to implement the Common Core standards. "You're one of the districts moving forward. You are really trying to commit to what it really means to be college and career ready," Barry said, adding that the standards will focus on learning progressions instead of grade-level progressions.
On Sept. 7, the U.S. Department of Education recognized 269 schools across the country as 2012 National Blue Ribbon Schools.
In this commentary, National Center on Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker responds to an Aug. 15 column in the Washington Post by Marion Brady that he feels is "way off the mark" in regards to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
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